Truth is the beginning of wisdom…

Quotes To Ponder

A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse [money, bounty, assistance, gifts] from the public treasury.
- Alexis de Tocqueville

From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world's greatest civilizations has been 200 years.
- Alexander Frazer Tytler

Archive for May 15th, 2008

Remember the election in 2006 a little over a year ago?
1) Consumer confidence stood at a 2 1/2 year high.
2) Regular gasoline sold for $2.19 a gallon.
3) The unemployment rate was 4.5%.

Since voting in a Democratically controlled Congress in 2006 we have seen:
1) Consumer confidence plummeted.
2) The cost of regular gasoline soar to over $3.50 a gallon.
3) Unemployment is up to 5% (a 10% increase).
4) American households have seen $2.3 trillion in equity value evaporate (stock and mutual fund losses).
5) Americans have seen their home equity drop by $1.2 trillion dollars.
6) 1% of American homes are in foreclosure.

America voted for “change” in 2006, and we got it! Change to a Democrat majority Congress … remember it is Congress that makes the law, not the President.

Quote of the Day: “My friends, we live in the greatest nation in the history of the world. I hope you’ll join with me as we try to change it.” – Barack Obama.

CHANGE IT TO WHAT? … more of the same from Democrats? … Enough of this type of change.

Income Tax Statistics . . .

Taxes under Clinton 1999
Single making 30K – tax $8,400
Single making 50K – tax $14,000
Single making 75K – tax $23,250
Married making 60K – tax $16,800
Married making 75K – tax $21,000
Married making 125K – tax $38,750

Taxes under Bush 2008
Single making 30K – tax $4,500
Single making 50K – tax $12,500
Single making 75K – tax $18,750
Married making 60K- tax $9,000
Married making 75K – tax $18,750
Married making 125K – tax $31,250

It is amazing how many people who fall into the categories above think Bush is messing with them and Bill Clinton was the greatest President ever. If Obama or Hillary are elected, they both say they will repeal the Bush tax cuts and a good portion of the people who fall into the categories above can’t wait for it to happen. This is like the movie The Sting with Paul Newman; you scam somebody out of some money and they don’t even know what happened.

See The Real Cost Of Illegal Immigration . . .

We have been hammered with the propaganda that it is the Iraq war and the war on terror that is bankrupting us. I now find that to be RIDICULOUS. I hope the following 14 reasons are forwarded over and over again until they are read so many times that the reader gets sick of reading them. Included the URL’s for verification of all the following facts.

1. $11 Billion to $22 billion is spent on welfare to illegal aliens each year by state governments.
Verify at: http://tinyurl.com/zob77

11. During the year of 2005 alone there were 4 to 10 MILLION illegal aliens that crossed our southern border also, as many as 19,500 illegal aliens from Terrorist Countries. Millions of pounds of drugs, cocaine, meth, heroin and marijuana, crossed into the US from the southern border.
Verify at: Homeland Security Report: http://tinyurl.com/t9sht

An internal Federal Bureau of Investigation presentation states that counterfeit Cisco routers imported from China may cause unexpected failures in American networks. The equipment could also leave secure systems open to attack through hidden backdoors. The scope of the problem is broad and results from a complicated supply chain originating in Shen Zhen.

From a narrow project failures perspective, network problems caused by this equipment should be treated as any other hardware malfunction. Of course, the entire concept of third parties using compromised hardware to infiltrate public and private systems in the United States is another matter entirely.

Faulty networking hardware can be a nightmare to troubleshoot and fix. For example, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) location at Los Angeles Airport (LAX) suffered a failed router last year; the problem delayed 20,000 passengers before technicians successfully isolated and repaired the issue.

The following slides, pulled from the larger presentation, indicate how seriously the FBI is taking this threat to national security.

As costly as the breakdown of the family is to children, divorce and unwed parenting cost U.S. taxpayers at least $112 billion annually according to a study released April 15th. When calculated, the national, state and local costs add up to more than $1 trillion over the last decade. This is caused, in part, by high poverty rates of single, female-headed households, which lead to higher spending on welfare, criminal justice and education programs.

Unfortunately, as the report documents, there are fewer healthy marriages in America now than there were 25 years ago. Between 1970 and 2005, the percentage of children being raised in two-parent families dropped from 85 to 68 percent.

“This study documents for the first time that divorce and unwed childbearing – besides being bad for children – are also costing taxpayers a ton of money,” said David Blankenhorn, president of the Institute for American Values, which is associated with the study.

The principal causes of this drop were the high divorce rate and the increase in the number of out-of-wedlock births. While the number of divorces has declined slightly in recent years, the percentage of children born to unmarried mothers has continued to grow. The costs of this family fragmentation are not limited to the children. As one expert wrote, “Divorce and unwed childbearing create substantial public costs, paid by taxpayers.”

As this information emerges, it is not new news to the church – and really to society, if they would stop and take a serious look at the condition of the family in America today. If both society and the church, seeing the necessity of the family unit, would join forces and work together a huge difference could be made, that not only would be good for the family, but for all America as well.

We certainly can be doing more to help marriages and families succeed. We could invest money for marriage education and other programs to increase marriage stability as Texas recently did. They have just invested $15 million over two years and their calculations were that if they only had a 1% success rate it would save $30 million per year.

Even if you set aside the social, cultural, and moral dimensions of marriage, it is clear that government should have a vital interest in promoting healthy marriages. Healthy marriages produce people who are better able to take care of themselves and their families. Even modest increases in the number of “stable marriages” could save taxpayers a lot of money. While we will never eliminate divorce and unwed childbearing entirely, we can certainly be doing more to help marriages and families succeed.

The most important thing government can do to fight family fragmentation is to stop promoting marriage substitutes. A decline in marriage and an increase in family fragmentation coincides with the introduction of legally sanctioned substitutes for traditional marriage (like civil unions and, now, same-sex marriages). These substitutes are dangerous and counterproductive as they inevitably weaken and destabilize the legitimate family that is based on matrimony. Even the best “marriage-strengthening” program can not compete with the message “marriage doesn’t matter.”

The bottom line … if we want to make a dent in the social and economic costs of family fragmentation, the first order of business is to promote and strengthen traditional marriage and accept no substitutes.

Together our community and our churches need to invest in things that would strengthen marriage!